Main Street eBook

The authors whom she read were most of them frightfully
annoyed by the Vida Sherwins. They were young
American sociologists, young English realists, Russian
horrorists; Anatole France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells,
Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood
Anderson, Henry Mencken, and all the other subversive
philosophers and artists whom women were consulting
everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in New York,
in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing-rooms,
Alabama schools for negroes. From them she got
the same confused desire which the million other women
felt; the same determination to be class-conscious
without discovering the class of which she was to be
conscious.

Certainly her reading precipitated her observations
of Main Street, of Gopher Prairie and of the several
adjacent Gopher Prairies which she had seen on drives
with Kennicott. In her fluid thought certain convictions
appeared, jaggedly, a fragment of an impression at
a time, while she was going to sleep, or manicuring
her nails, or waiting for Kennicott.

These convictions she presented to Vida Sherwin—­Vida
Wutherspoon—­beside a radiator, over a bowl
of not very good walnuts and pecans from Uncle Whittier’s
grocery, on an evening when both Kennicott and Raymie
had gone out of town with the other officers of the
Ancient and Affiliated Order of Spartans, to inaugurate
a new chapter at Wakamin. Vida had come to the
house for the night. She helped in putting Hugh
to bed, sputtering the while about his soft skin.
Then they talked till midnight.

What Carol said that evening, what she was passionately
thinking, was also emerging in the minds of women
in ten thousand Gopher Prairies. Her formulations
were not pat solutions but visions of a tragic futility.
She did not utter them so compactly that they can be
given in her words; they were roughened with “Well,
you see” and “if you get what I mean”
and “I don’t know that I’m making
myself clear.” But they were definite enough,
and indignant enough.

III

In reading popular stories and seeing plays, asserted
Carol, she had found only two traditions of the American
small town. The first tradition, repeated in
scores of magazines every month, is that the American
village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty,
and clean sweet marriageable girls. Therefore
all men who succeed in painting in Paris or in finance
in New York at last become weary of smart women, return
to their native towns, assert that cities are vicious,
marry their childhood sweethearts and, presumably,
joyously abide in those towns until death.

The other tradition is that the significant features
of all villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns,
gold bricks, checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails, and
shrewd comic old men who are known as “hicks”
and who ejaculate “Waal I swan.”
This altogether admirable tradition rules the vaudeville
stage, facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper
humor, but out of actual life it passed forty years
ago. Carol’s small town thinks not in hoss-swapping
but in cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes,
silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs, leather-upholstered
Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures,
land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain, and a chaste
version of national politics.